The hardback of The Vision Revolution has been out for one year, and I couldn’t be happier with the reaction it has received, including reviews in fantastic places like the Wall Street Journal and Sciam Mind and mentions in places like the New York Times. Soon it will appear in China, Korea and Germany.

There has, however, been one gnawing problem with the hardback.

…the problem is its hardbackiness.

To understand my trouble with hardbackiness, let me back up and explain what I was aiming for in writing the book.

As a start, let me first describe what I was not aiming for: Not an academic monograph, to be read only by specialists. Not a journalist-style coverage of a topic. And not a book about how to help your brain, like “20 ways to make your brain smarter than the Johnson’s next door.”

My aim was not only to write a book that is readable (and funny) to non-specialists (i.e., a “trade” or “popular” book). Rather, my aim was to build a book that is part of the scientific conversation.

By “part of the scientific conversation,” I mean that the book is filled with ideas and evidence that go beyond what is found in the technical journal articles.

That, I believe, is what makes a popular science book exciting to non-specialists and laymen: in reading the book they are not merely learning about science, but are witnessing a portion of the lively scientific exchange.

The reader is put within the scientific conversation itself.

I didn’t come to this philosophy about what makes a good popular science book on my own. As I struggled with the drafts of my first trade book proposals, I had the opportunity to meet with John Brockman (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/brockman.html ), the noted literary agent, author and the founder of The Edge ( http://www.edge.org ). It was he who laid out this good-popular-science book philosophy to me, and although it sounded obvious after he said it, it by no means was obvious to me beforehand.

That’s what makes authors like Desmond Morris, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker. Daniel Dennett and Andy Clark so compelling. It’s not merely that they write well, but that they’re making a scientific case for their viewpoint. …and you and I get to watch.

And so that’s what I did in The Vision Revolution, take the reader along as I lay out the case for a radical re-thinking of how we see. Color vision evolved for seeing skin and the underlying emotions, not for finding fruit. Forward-facing eyes evolved for seeing better in forests, not for seeing in depth. Illusions are due to our brain’s attempt to correct for the neural eye-to-brain delay, so as to “perceive the present.” And our ability to read is due to writing having culturally evolved to make written words look like natural objects, just what our illiterate visual system is competent at processing.

In aiming to be part of the lively scientific exchange, there was another thing I tried to inject into the book: I tried to not take things too seriously.

As I have discussed in an earlier piece [ http://www.science20.com/mark_changizi/mind_hacks_over_stacks_facts ], too often science is treated as a set of textbook facts. Textbooks usually give that impression, and even when they are careful to say that science is in fact deeply in flux, the textbook look and feel dupes most of us into imbuing the book with too much truthiness. This is especially a problem for the cognitive and brain sciences, because the object of study is the most complicated object in the known universe, and we very often don’t know what we’re talking about. (We don’t know jack: http://changizi.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/18/ )

And that brings me back to the most significant flaw with the hardback version of The Vision Revolution: its hardbackiness. The rigidity of a hardback suggests truthiness, and although I do believe the ideas I put forth and defend in the book are true, I don’t want the cover’s hardness to be part of my argument.

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